3rd TB hard drive failure in 6 weeks. Am I doing something wrong?

June 21, 2007 11:46 AM

3rd TB hard drive failure in 6 weeks. Am I doing something wrong?

I purchased 2 1TB exterbal one touch III drives from Seagate in February to the tune of almost $1000.

1. 6 weeks ago my main drive started giving me error messages and got a little noisy. No big deal I know these big drives are a little touchy. Called Seagate got an RMA.The turn around time was quick and I had my backup so I could live with it. Minor inconvenience.

2. Two nights ago the replacement drive gave me an error. I called the support/warranty group in India and they issued another RMA. I am now fairly annoyed with two failurs so quickly back together.

3. Last night the backup gave me an error message and sure enough Seagate says I must replace the drive and they will issue an RMA. I'm livid with anger.

They will send me a replacement fist at a cost of $20 so I can back up beforehand. It costs $10 each to send them back. 45 minutes on the phone with india at a minimum each time this happens. It's not even the money, it's the worry I will lose my data or this will happen again and again.

Usage: I have both drive hooked up through USB. I am transferring all my music losslessly and had them full about 300GB with an estimated 600GB by the time I finish. I run Itunes from the files on the drive almost daily and rip new cd's to them two or three times a week. Some music and files are irreplaceable. Sure I can have them on CDR but that is not the point of a hard drive with a backup. I back up using Synctoy's echo backup software everytime I write a large amout of data to the main drive.

Am I doing something wrong? They sit on my desk and do not get disturbed. The only problem I can see is I have no air conditioning and it's been very hot. Over 80 for the last few days in my office.

I want to talk to one of thier product managers to make sure I am caring for my drives properly. Good luck to me I know. Until I can get ahold of one does anyone here have any info, ideas or comments on my problem? What should I expect customer service wise from Seagate? I don't even know what I can expect or even want out of Seagate other than more warranty replacements. I just want to know my drives will work and my data is safe.

Again, am I doing something wrong?

Pardon my spelling and grammar.

posted by 4Lnqvv to computers & internet (15 comments total)

Heat is a killer. Get a desk fan, point it at the enclosures.
posted by meehawl at 11:56 AM on June 21, 2007

FWIW: I have a 300 GB in a cheap, fan-less, Comp-USA external USB case. The drive ran constantly for a couple of months, very hot. When I finally turned it off it wouldn’t come back up again until after about a half hour of ugly whirring and grinding. I think the heat killed it. Now I have an Infrant ReadyNAS running 4x500gb. So far so good.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, heat is bad. Try using a case with better cooling.
posted by bondcliff at 12:07 PM on June 21, 2007

Yeah, heat is a real problem; however, I think the real danger isn't the 80 degrees but poor ventilation. Make sure there is plenty of space between the air vents and the walls/whatever is around them.

At some point, you may want to try to get a refund and buy a different brand. Seagate drives are fine IMHO, but it sounds like the enclosure may be suboptimal.
posted by bsdfish at 12:08 PM on June 21, 2007

How do you have the drives set up? From what I can tell, the 1TB One Touch III isn't really a 1TB drive, it's 2 500GB drives set up as RAID-0 (striped). So it can "fail" if either of the drives inside it conk out. Particularly with Maxtor drives, that by itself would make me very, very scared.

If you're mirroring two striped arrays (so you have a 'mirror of stripes' configuration, sometimes called RAID-10, I think) then you are sort of balancing against the risk of one failing drive, but you're not getting a lot of protection. If you lose one drive in each array, you're toast. (In my mind, that would seem to counteract the striping and bring your failure odds back up to about that of a single drive...which isn't what I'd want for irreplaceable data.)

According to the Amazon page for the drive, you're not the first to have had problems with it. It's not a "real" Seagate product -- it's a Maxtor-legacy product, and Maxtor had/s a ... less-than-stellar (to put it politely) reputation for reliability.

Apparently some of the newer 1TB arrays actually have Seagate drives inside them, instead of Maxtors (you can tell from looking at the S/N) so if you go through enough of them, maybe eventually you'll get one that doesn't suck. (Serial starting with "STM" is good, presumably anything else means 'Maxtor inside' and is bad.)

Keeping them in a hot environment without A/C probably doesn't help, particularly if the case wasn't engineered well and doesn't keep the drives cool. But short of taking the drives out of the enclosure or modifying it, there's not a lot you can do. (Does the manual list environmental conditions it's designed to run in? I'd check that and make sure you're not running them in an ambient temperature that's beyond the design limits of that enclosure.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:12 PM on June 21, 2007

Kadin2048, you are correct. It's 2 500GB drives striped.
posted by 4Lnqvv at 12:16 PM on June 21, 2007

Next question. What drives are recomended for future use? The Infrant drives are expensive.
posted by 4Lnqvv at 12:19 PM on June 21, 2007

The reviews at newegg make me think this product is a serious lemon.

The reviews of this Fantom are pretty positive.

Regardless of what you get, PC manufacturers expect their equipment to be a climate controled room. Think about getting a window AC unit or at least pointing a strong fan at it. You can see your drives temperature with many popular utilities like this one (scroll down). Not sure if this works over USB. Regardless, if youre consistanty over 45 degrees you have a problem.
posted by damn dirty ape at 12:55 PM on June 21, 2007

FWIW, the fantom has a built-in fan.
posted by damn dirty ape at 12:56 PM on June 21, 2007

I have a friend who swears by the aluminum-enclosure Lacie ones, but I can't say personally. (The only external HD I have is a Seagate drive in a cheap CompUSA case, and I only turn it on as-needed to do backups.) Lacie had some issues with the first generation of their Bigger Disk series, but I haven't heard anything too bad since then. Maybe that was the kick in the pants they needed to address the issues.

I think the critical problem with external hard drives is that too many manufacturers think you can just slap a 3.5" drive into a box with a bridge board and watch the money roll in. In reality, portable hard drives, good ones, are a tough product to do well.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:05 PM on June 21, 2007

UPS? Noisy power lines can be hell on hard drives, and a cheap power supply won't fix the problem.
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:22 PM on June 21, 2007

I'd guess heat. I've gone through several internal harddrives that would fail intermittently and in inexplicable ways and cause all sorts of bizarre system errors. As soon as I installed a couple of fans directly on the drive mounts (and left my case completely open), along with a utility to continuously monitor their temperatures, those errors and failures stopped.
posted by J-Train at 1:40 PM on June 21, 2007

Kadin2048: RAID-10 is stripe of mirrors, i.e. 2 * RAID-1 mirrors at the bottom and a RAID-0 stripe over those. Mirror of stripes is RAID 01 (or 0+1), with 2 * RAID-0 stripes at the bottom and a RAID-1 mirror over them.

The latter configuration should be avoided like the plague, since a 1 disk failure will render *two* underlying disks useless (the failed disk, and the other side of the stripe), while providing no performance benefit whatsoever over RAID-10.

It doesn't sound like 4Lnqvv is using either, just 2 seperate RAID-0's, but yeah.. don't get those two mixed up.

For what it's worth, I have a 750G Seagate OneTouch; it's 1 disk (so more reliable and cooler than a RAID-0 of 2) and sounds/feels like it has reasonable ventilation. For general use, I prefer something like this though.
posted by Freaky at 5:51 PM on June 21, 2007

Incidentally: most external usb enclosures don't spin down the drives. Which is likely to shorten the expected lifespan of any harddrive. RAID also tends to be more intensive on the drives; this combined with poor ventilation and climate control ... well, it really is a recipe for drive failure.
posted by ysabet at 7:10 PM on June 21, 2007

So in theory if I had gotten a 750GB drive that was one drive in stead of two I would have drives more than twice as reliable?

A. Because obviously the number of drives to fail is exactly half (twice as reliable) and

B. The one drive would in theory run cooler and "breath" a little better? (more than)

A+B=more than twice as reliable!

So I am thinking in the future a much better system would be:

1. a single drive system maybe only 750GB. (I estimate my entire usage would be 600GB but it was not that much more expensive for the full TB and at the time most &50's I believe were dual drives too.) However mount an internal SATA or two for backup in some kind of ventilated dock system like the Icydock Freaky recomends?

2. research my product better

3.???????

4. profit!?!?!
posted by 4Lnqvv at 10:20 PM on June 21, 2007

Pretty much, though if you're seeing that many failures with 2 disks, you still need to take care; 1/2 of a high failure rate is still a pretty high failure rate. A probationary period where you have diminished trust in a drive to start with is a good plan thanks to the bathtub curve, but of course backups are always a good idea.

I haven't done any real testing with this OneTouch (how would I? I have a distinct lack of very small thermal probes), so I don't know how cool it actually keeps a drive; an E-SATA enclosure might be a good idea, since you should be able to use SMART to monitor the drive temperature etc. It'll be faster too.

That Icydock bay probably won't keep your drives any cooler than a decent case with fixed drive bays, but if you're lacking actively cooled internal 3.5" bays, or just want hot-swap they're not a bad idea. Take heed of the measurements though; I find longer graphics cards (e.g. 7800GTX, 8800GTX) tend to want some of the space it and the fan occupy in normal ATX cases.

For my bulk reliable storage I use one of these: Supermicro SC742T. Not cheap, and not quiet, but it'll laugh off a 35c day even when full of disks thanks to the twin 92mm fans behind the hot-swap bay.
posted by Freaky at 7:07 AM on June 22, 2007